I didn't stay to watch my friends for long, looking them over as they gathered around Grace. Once it was clear they'd survived the battle without injury, I passed back into fate. There was no particular pull, nothing fate was eager to manifest to me, so I drifted according to my curiosity, tracing the trails of mana the ley lines left behind to the apostles and demon lords scattered across the southern continent.
I found Evla first, feeling the closest to her out of any of them. She had arrived in the heart of the Fire Kingdom, a capital I'd only heard about from stories Alex shared around the banquet tables of the Divine Throne. It was dry and arid, with the same desert lands as Blacksand. The city was a chaotic mess of sprawling streets and single-story buildings. Even the walls were low, the towers barely thirty feet tall. Fires burned in every sector, their thick plumes of black smoke vanishing into the starry night.
